Tuesday, October 16, 2007

Future planetary landers may fly like cockroaches

"That's one small flight for a cockroach, one giant leap for bugkind."

While that probably won't be the message beamed back to Earth from a future planetary lander after it touches down successfully on Mars, cockroaches may well have played a part in the landing – especially if biologist Tobias Seidl of the European Space Agency gets his way.

Three years ago, Seidl was on a field trip (studying desert ant navigation) in Tunisia when he and his colleagues found their apartment plagued by Blatta orientalis, an appallingly grimy cockroach. So they found a couple of brooms and swept the creepy critters out onto the balcony and over the edge – but they didn't just tumble to the ground.

Instead, the bugs – the male of the species as it turned out – unfurled rigid, flat wings and performed a perfect glide into some safe hidey holes below. It immediately struck Siedl, who majored in biomimetics (the art of engineering systems that mimic nature) that the way the cockroaches undertook this emergency, low-energy, controlled approach straight into a safe area is precisely what a planetary lander should do to avoid craters and rocks as it comes down on a planet's surface.

Siedl, who works in ESA's Advanced Concepts Team (it still has one, unlike NASA) points out that many landers have become planetary colliders – Mars Polar Lander and Beagle 2 to name but two. "The landing is one of the weak points," Seidl says. "If anything goes wrong with the parachute, braking rockets or airbags, it becomes a flying brick."

His answer: to study the neurophysiology and wing structure of B. Orientalis males (the female cannot fly) to see if they can come up with a better way for a lander to approach alien ground. ESA has already stumped up €23,000 for him to begin work.

His first task will be to acquire really high-speed video of the way the bug's wing mechanism works so they can analyse just how it steers so well. Then they will study its visual control system to see how it locates a safe landing place with such speed.

I think the idea is pretty cool: NASA's utterly marvellous Spirit and Opportunity Mars rovers look a bit like bugs, with their praying mantis-style camera "heads". So perhaps it's only right and fitting that bug biology should play its part in the future of Mars exploration.